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The Kingdom of God 



BY 



IAN . MACLAREN 



'? 



M 







NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

i895 



3Tit 



Copyright, 1895, 

BY 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY. 



All rights reserved. 




PRINTING HOUSE. NEW YORK, j 




THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

There are times when one wishes he had never 
read the New Testament Scriptures — that he might 
some day open St. Luke's Gospel and the most 
beautiful book in the world might come upon his 
soul like sunrise. It is a doubtful fortune to be 
born in Athens and every day to see the Parthe- 
non against the violet sky : better to make a single 
pilgrimage and carry for ever the vision of beauty 
in your heart. Devout Christians must be haunted 
by the fear that Jesus' sublime words may have 
lost their heavenliness through our familiarity, or 
that they may have been overlaid by our conven- 
tional interpretations. This misgiving is confirmed 
by the fact that from time to time a fresh discovery 
is made in Jesus' teaching. As a stranger, unfet- 
tered by tradition, will detect in a private gallery 
some masterpiece generations have overlooked, so 
an unbiassed mind will rescue from neglecting 
ages some lost idea of the Master. Two finds have 
been made within recent years ; the Divine Father- 
hood and the Kingdom of God. 

If any one will take the Gospels and read them, 
he will be amazed by the continual recurrence of 
this refrain, the " Kingdom of God" or " Heaven." 
Jesus is ever preaching the Kingdom of God and 



4 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

explaining it in parables and images of exquisite 
simplicity. He exhorts men to make any sacrifice 
that they may enter the Kingdom of God (St. Matt, 
xiii. 44-46). He warns certain that they must not 
look back lest they should not be fit for the King- 
dom of God (St. Luke ix. 62). He declares that 
it is not possible for others to enter the Kingdom 
of God (St. Matt. xix. 24). He encourages some 
one because he is not far from the Kingdom of 
God (St. Mark xii. 34). He gives to His chief 
Apostle the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven (Sfe. 
Matt. xvi. 19). He rates the Pharisees because 
they shut up the Kingdom of Heaven against men 
(St. Matt, xxiii. 13). He comforts the poor be- 
cause theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven (St. Matt, 
v. 3) ; and he invites the nations to sit down with 
Abraham in the Kingdom of Heaven (St. Matt, 
viii. 11). The Kingdom was in His thought the 
chiefest good of the soul and the hope of the world. 

" One far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves." 

Every prophet of the first order has his own 
message and it crystallizes into a favourite idea. 
With Moses the ruling idea was law ; with Con- 
fucius, it was morality ; with Buddha, it was Re- 
nunciation ; with Mohammed, it was God ; with 
Socrates, it was the Soul. With the Master, it 
was the Kingdom of God. The idea owed its 
origin to the Theocracy, its inspiration to Isaiah, 
its form to Daniel, its popularity to John Baptist. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 5 

When the forerunner's voice was stifled in the 
dungeon of Herod, Jesus caught up his word and 
preached the Utopia of John with a wider vision 
and sweeter note. The hereditary dream of the 
Jew passed through the soul of Jesus and was 
transformed. The local widened into the univer- 
sal ; the material was raised to the spiritual. A 
Jewish state with Jerusalem for its capital, and a 
greater David for its king, changed at the touch 
of Jesus into a moral kingdom whose throne should 
be in the heart and its borders coterminous with 
the race. The largeness of Jesus' mind is its glory 
and its misfortune. The magnificent conception 
was refused by His countrymen because their God 
was a national Deity ; it has been too often re- 
duced by His disciples because they have no hori- 
zon. They have been apt to think that Christian- 
ity is an extremely clever scheme by which a lim- 
ited number of souls will secure Heaven — a rocket 
apparatus for a shipwrecked crew. Perhaps there- 
fore outside people should be excused for speaking 
of Christianity as a system of the higher selfish- 
ness, because they have some grounds for their 
misunderstanding. Every one ought to read Jesus' 
own words and he would find that Jesus did not 
live and die to afford select Pharisees an immunity 
from the burden of their fellow men, but to found 
a Kingdom that would be the salvation of the 
world. 

It has been a calamity that Christians paid hardly 
any attention to the idea of the Kingdom of Jesus 



6 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

on which He was always insisting, and gave their 
whole mind to the entirely different idea of the 
Church, which Jesus only mentioned once with in- 
tention in a passage of immense difficulty. The 
Kingdom idea flourishes in every corner of the 
three Gospels, and languishes in the Acts and Epis- 
tles, while the Church-idea is practically non-exist- 
ent in Jesus' sermons, but saturates the letters of 
St. Paul. This means that the idea which unites 
has been forgotten, the idea which separates has 
been magnified. With all respect to the ablest 
Apostle of Jesus one may be allowed to express 
his regret that St. Paul had not said less about the 
Church and more about the Kingdom. But one 
knows by an instinct why the Church has a 
stronger fascination for the religious mind than 
the Kingdom. The Church is a visible and exclu- 
sive institution which men can manage and use. 
The Kingdom is a spiritual and inclusive society 
whose members are selected by natural fitness and 
which is beyond human control. One must affirm 
this or that to be a member of the Church ; one 
must be something to be a part of the Kingdom of 
God. Every person who is like Christ in charac- 
ter, or is of His mind, is included in the Kingdom. 
No natural reading of Church can include Plato : 
no natural reading of Kingdom can exclude him. 
The effect of the two institutions upon the world 
is a contrast. The characteristic product of the 
Church is ecclesiastics ; the characteristic product 
of the Kingdom is philanthropists. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 7 

Jesus' Kingdom commends itself to the imagina- 
tion because it is to come, when God's will is done 
on earth as it is done in heaven — it is the Kingdom 
of the Beatitudes. It commends itself to the reason 
because it has come whenever any one is attempt- 
ing God's will — it is the Kingdom of the Parables. 
An ideal state, it ever allures and inspires its sub- 
jects ; a real state, it sustains and commands them. 
Had Jesus conceived His Kingdom in the future 
only, He had made His disciples dreamers ; had 
He centred it in the present only, He had made 
them theorists. As it is, one labours on its build- 
ing with its splendid model before his eyes ; one 
possesses it in his heart, and yet is ever entering 
into its fulness. When Jesus sat down with the 
twelve in the upper room, the Kingdom of God 
had come ; when the Son of Man shall be seen 
" coming in a cloud with power and great glory' ' 
it shall be " nigh at hand" (St. Luke xxi. 27, 31). 
As Jesus came once and ever cometh, His King- 
dom is a present fact and an endless hope. 

Jesus commands attention and respect at once 
when He insisted on a present Kingdom. It was 
not going to be, it was now and here. That day 
a man could see, could enter, could possess, could 
serve the Kingdom of God. Jesus did not despise 
this world in which we live nor despair of human 
society to which we belong. He did not discount 
earth in favour of heaven nor make the life which 
now is a mere passage to rest. He deliberately 
founded His Kingdom in this world, and antici- 



8 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

pated it would run its course amid present circum- 
stances. If you had pointed to rival forces and 
opposing interests, Jesus accepted the risk. If sin 
and selfishness had their very seat here, then the 
more need for the counteraction of the Kingdom. 
In fact, if there is to be a kingdom of God any- 
where, it must be in this world ; and if it be im- 
possible here where Jesus died, it will be impossi- 
ble in Mars or anywhere. When Jesus said the 
Kingdom of Heaven, be sure He did not mean an 
unseen refuge whither a handful might one day 
escape like persecuted and disheartened Puritans 
fleeing from a hopeless England, but He intended 
what might be and then was in Galilee, what 
should be and now is in England. " To those who 
speak to you of heaven and seek to separate it 
from earth," wrote Mazzini, "you will say that 
heaven and earth are one even as the way and the 
goal are one." And he used also to say, and his 
words are coming true before our eyes, " The first 
real faith that shall arise upon the ruins of the old 
worn-out creeds will transform the whole of our 
actual social organization, because the whole his- 
tory of humanity is but the repetition in form and 
degree of the Christian prayer, " Thy kingdom 
come : Thy will be done on earth as it is in 
heaven.' ' 

Jesus' next point is that the Kingdom consists of 
regenerate individuals, and therefore He was 
always trying to create character. This is the 
salient difference between Jesus and the Jewish 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 9 

reformers and all reformers. The reformer, who 
has his own function and is to be heartily com- 
mended, approaches humanity from the outside 
and proceeds by machinery ; Jesus approaches 
humanity from the inside and proceeds by influ- 
ence. No one can ask a question without at the 
same time revealing his mind ; and so when the 
Pharisees demanded of Jesus when the Kingdom 
of God should come (St. Luke xvii. 20), one under- 
stands what was their method of social reforma- 
tion. The new state of things w r hich they called 
the Kingdom of God — and no better name for 
Utopia has ever been found — was to come with 
observation. It was to be a sudden demonstra- 
tion, and behold the golden age has begun. What 
they exactly meant was the arrival of a viceroy 
from God endowed with supernatural power and 
authority. Till He came, patriotism could do 
nothing ; when He came, patriotism would simply 
obey, and in a day the hopes of the saints would 
be realized and the promises of the prophets ful- 
filled. At one blow the Roman grip would be 
loosened from the throat of the Jewish nation ; the 
grinding bondage of taxation swept away ; the 
insolent licence of Herod's court ended ; the pride 
of the priestly aristocracy reduced, and the gross 
abuses of the temple worship redressed, When 
the Messiah came, they would see the ideal of 
patriotism in all ages : " A Free State and a Free 
Church/' It was a splendid dream, the idea of a 
ready-made commonwealth, that has touched in 



io THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

turn and glorified Savonarola and Sir Thomas 
More, Scottish Covenanters and English Puritans, 
and inspired the noblest minds in Greece. It is 
that the society can be regenerated from without 
and in the mass ! It is regeneration by machinery 
— very magnificent machinery no doubt, but still 
machinery. 

Jesus believed that if the Kingdom of God is to 
come at all, it must be by another method, and it 
was the perpetual exposition of His method that 
brought Him into collision with the Pharisees. He 
knew that the Messiah for the Jews must not be a 
supernatural Roman emperor or a JDeus ex machind, 
doing for men what they would not do for them- 
selves. This Messiah was a moral impossibility 
and this paternal Government would be useless. 
The true Messiah was a Saviour who would hold 
up a personal ideal and stimulate men to fulfil it. 
What was any nation but three measures of meal 
to be leavened ; you must leaven it particle by 
particle till it be all changed. Instead of looking 
hither and thither for the kingdom of God, it 
would be better to look for it in men's own hearts 
and lives. The Pharisees prated about being free, 
meaning they had certain political privileges ; but 
Jesus told them that the highest liberty was free- 
dom from sin. Did a Pharisee — and the Pharisee 
with all his faults was the patriot of his day — de- 
sire to better his nation ; then let him begin by 
bettering himself. When the Pharisees learned 
humility and sympathy, the golden age was not 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. n 

« 

far distant from Jewry. Jesus' perpetual sugges- 
tion to the patriotric class of His day was that they 
should turn from the politics of the state to the 
ethics of their own lives. 

Jesus afforded a standing illustration of His own 
advice by His marked abstention from politics. 
His attitude is not only unexpected, it is amazing 
and perplexing. He never said one word against 
the Roman domination ; He was on cordial terms 
with Roman officers ; He cast His shield over the 
hated publican ; He tolerated even Herod and 
Pilate. This was not an accident ; it was His line. 
When clever tacticians laid a trap for Him and 
pressed Him for a confession of His political creed, 
He escaped by telling them He had none. Some 
things were civic, some religious. Let each sphere 
be kept apart. Render unto Caesar the things 
which are Caesar's, and unto God the things which 
are God's : as for Him, His concern was with 
divine things. Jesus was so guarded that He re- 
fused to arbitrate in a dispute about property — a 
duty now greedily undertaken by servants. When 
He stood before Pilate, on the day of the cross, he 
told that bewildered officer that His kingdom was 
not of this world, and did not give him the slight- 
est help in arranging a compromise. 

On the other hand, none can read Jesus' words 
without being perfectly certain that they must 
sooner or later change the trend of politics and the 
colour of the state. His contemptuous deprecia- 
tion of the world, His solemn appreciation of the 



12 THE KINGDOM OF GOD, 

soul, His sense of the danger of riches, His doc- 
trine of the Fatherhood of God f His sympathy 
with the poor, His enthusiasm of humanity, was 
not likely to return unto Him void. No man can 
read Jesus' Sermon on the Mount or His parables 
— largely taken from the sphere of labour — or His 
arguments with the Pharisees, without being leav- 
ened with new and unworldly ideas. When these 
ideas have taken hold of the mind, they will be 
carried as principles of action into the state. Moral 
truths ripen slowly ; but given time, and Chris- 
tianity was bound to become the most potent force 
in the state, although Jesus had never said one 
word about politics, and His apostles had adhered 
closely to His example. Men who have been fed 
with Christ's bread, and in whose heait His spirit 
is striving, will not long tolerate slavery, tyranny, 
vice, or ignorance. If they do not apply the prin- 
ciple to the fact to-day, they will to-morrow. 
Their conscience is helpless in the grip of Christ's 
word. They will be constrained to labour in the 
cause of Christ, and when their work is done men 
will praise them. It is right that they should re- 
ceive their crown, but the glory does not belong 
to Hampden and Howard and Wilberforce and 
Shaftesbury and Lincoln and Gordon ; it belongs 
to Jesus, who stood behind these great souls and 
inspired them. He never assailed Pilate with bit- 
ter invective, or any other person, except religious 
hypocrites ; He never hinted at an insurrection. 
But it is Jesus, more than any other man or force. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD, 13 

that has made Pilates impossible and taught the 
human race to live and die for freedom. 

Politics are, after all, only a necessary machin- 
ery : what comes first is ideas. Just as there is 
the physical which we see and handle, and the 
metaphysical which eye has not seen nor ear heard, 
so there is the political which takes shape in gov- 
ernment and legislatures and laws, and there is the 
meta-political — to use a happy phrase in Lux 
Mundi — which is before all and above all, or poli- 
tics are worthless. And just as no wise physicist 
rails at the metaphysical because it cannot be 
weighed in scales, but freely acknowledges that it 
is the spirit of the material, so every one knows 
that all worthy politics are the offspring of noble 
ideas. When Jesus denied Himself to politics, He 
did not abdicate His kingdom ; He set up His 
throne above all the world-kingdoms and en- 
trenched it among the principles that judge and 
govern life. When He declined to agitate, He did 
not abandon the people. He could not, for, unlike 
many of their pseudo-friends, Jesus loved the peo- 
ple unto death. But He had a wide horizon. He 
was not content to change their circumstances, He 
dared to attempt something higher — to change 
their souls. 

Had Jesus depended on a scheme rather than an 
influence, He had failed. Imagine if He had an- 
ticipated the fruits of Christianity, and asked the 
world to accept the emancipation of the slave and 
the equality of woman, and civil rights and relig- 



14 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

ious liberty, Christianity would have been crushed 
at its birth. It would have spelled anarchy, and 
in that day would have been anarchy. With the 
slow, sure education of centuries, these changes 
have come to be synonymous with righteousness. 
Christianity may be to-day pregnant with changes 
for which we are not yet prepared. They will 
come to birth by-and-by and find people prepared 
for them. What to our fathers would have seemed 
a revelation will seem to our children a regenera- 
tion. A century ago a slave-owner would have 
defended himself from God's Word, to-day he 
would be cast headlong out of the Church. Yes- 
terday a master sweated his servants without sense 
cf wrong-doing, to-day he is ashamed. To-day a 
millionaire is respected ; there are signs that in 
after years a man leaving a huge fortune will be 
thought a semi-criminal. So does the Spirit of 
Jesus spread and ferment. Christ did not ask for 
power to make laws, He asked for a few men to 
train — for soil in which to sow His truth. He was 
content to wait till a generation arose, and said, 
" Before God this must be done," and then it 
would be done as Jesus intended. Possess the 
imagination with an ideal, and one need not vex 
himself about action. 

Jesus laid himself alongside sinful people, and 
out of them Fie slowly built up the new kingdom. 
If a man was a formalist, he must be born again ; 
if the slave of riches, he must sell all he had ; if in 
the toils of a darling sin, he must pluck out his 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD, 15 

right eye to enter the kingdom of God. New men 
to make a new state. The kingdom was humility, 
purity, generosity, unselfishness. It was the reign 
of character ; it was the struggle for perfection. 
Chunder Sen, the Indian prophet, described Jesus' 
Kingdom perfectly : " A spiritual congregation of 
souls born anew to God/' Say not, " Lo here, lo 
here/' as if one could see a system or a govern- 
ment. " The kingdom of God is within you." 

Investigate a little farther, and you notice Jesus 
fused His disciples into one body, and by this act 
alone separated Himself from the method of philos- 
ophy. Philosophy is content with an audience ; 
Jesus demands a society. Philosophy teaches men 
to think ; Jesus moves them to do. Philosophy 
can do no more because it has no centre of unity : 
the kingdom of God is richer, for there is Jesus. 
Socrates obliterated himself ; Jesus asserted Him- 
self, and united His followers to each other by 
binding them to Himself. Loyalty to Jesus was 
to be the spinal cord to the new body, and two 
sacraments were to be the signs of the new spirit. 
Each was perfect in its simplicity — a beautiful 
poem. One was Baptism, where the candidate for 
God's kingdom disappeared into water and ap- 
peared again with another name. This meant that 
he had died to self and had risen a new creature, 
the child of the Divine Will. The other was the 
Lord's Supper, where Jesus' disciples eat bread 
and drink wine in remembrance of His death. 
This meant that they had entered into the spirit of 



1 6 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

their Master and given themselves to the service 
of the world. Those are the only rites of Jesus, 
those His bonds, and with this lowly equipment — 
two pledges of sacrifice — began the kingdom of 
God. Within all nations, and under the shadow 
of all governments, dividing none, resisting none, 
winning all and uniting all, was to rise the new 
state of peace and goodwill toward men. 

How was the kingdom to impress itself upon the 
world and change the colour of human life ? As 
Jesus did Himself, and after no other fashion. Of 
all conquerors He has had the highest ambition, 
and above them all He has seen His desire. He 
has dared to demand men's hearts as well as their 
lives and has won them — how ? By coercion ? by 
stratagem ? by cleverness ? by splendour ? By 
none of those means that have been used by rulers. 
By a scheme of his own invention — by the Cross. 
The Cross meant the last devotion to humanity ; 
it was the pledge of the most uncomplaining and 
effectual ministry. When you inquire the re- 
sources of the Kingdom of Heaven, behold the 
Cross. They are faith and love. Its soldiers are 
the humble, the meek, the gentle, the peaceful. 
■' Forgive your enemies," said Jesus ; " help the 
miserable, restore the fallen, set the captive free. 
Love as I have loved, and you will succeed/' 
Amazing simplicity ! amazing originality ! Hith- 
erto kingdoms had stood on the principle of selfish- 
ness — grasp and keep. This kingdom was to rest 
on sacrifice — suffer and serve. Amazing hope, that 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 17 

anything so weak, so helpless, could regenerate 
the masterful world ! But Jesus has not been put 
to* shame : His plan has not failed. There are 
many empires on the face of the earth to-day, but 
none so dominant as the kingdom of God. Jesus 
by the one felicitous stroke of the Cross has re- 
placed the rule of rights by the idea of sacrifice ; 
and when Jesus' mind has obtained everywhere, 
and men cease to ask, " What am I to get ?" and 
begin to say, " What can I give ?" then we shall 
see a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwell- 
eth righteousness. 

It was natural that the imagination of Jesus 
should inspire heroic souls in every age ; it was 
perhaps inevitable that few could enter into His 
mind. Nothing has given such a moral impetus 
to human society ; nothing has conferred such 
nobility of character as the kingdom of God ; noth- 
ing has been so sadly misunderstood. The sublime 
self-restraint of Jesus, His inexhaustible patience, 
His immovable charity, His unerring insight, have 
not descended to His disciples. They longed to 
anticipate the victory of righteousness, and burned 
to cleanse the world by force. They have gained 
for themselves an imperishable name, but they 
have failed. When the Roman Empire was laid 
waste, and the world seemed to be falling to pieces, 
St. Augustine described the new empire that should 
rise on the ashes of the old. The City of God stands 
first among his writings, and created the Holy 
Roman Empire, but the Papacy has not redeemed 



1 8 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

humanity. When the life of Florence was eaten, 
out by the Medicis, Savonarola purified the city for 
a space with a thunderstorm. The Florentines 
cast out their Herods at the bidding of their Bap- 
tist, they burned their vanities in the market-place, 
they elected Jesus King of Florence by acclama- 
tion. In a little they brought Herod back, and 
burned the Baptist in the same market-place. The 
Puritans were quiet, serious, peaceable men who 
were outraged by the reign of unrighteousness, 
and drew the sword to deliver England. They 
made the will of God triumphant for a little. Then 
came the reaction, and iniquity covered the land 
as with a flood. It was high failure, but it was 
failure. It does not become us to criticise those 
forlorn hopes ; we ought to learn from their re- 
verse. The kingdom of God can only rule over 
willing hearts ; it has no helots within its borders. 
It advances by individual conversion, it stands in 
individual consecration. Laws can do but little 
for this cause ; the sword less than nothing. The 
kingdom will come in a land when it has come in 
the hearts of the people — neither sooner nor later. 
The kingdom of God cometh to a man when he 
sets up Jesus' Cross in his heart, and begins to 
live what Mr. Laurence Oliphant used to call " the 
life." It passes on its way when that man rises 
from table and girds himself and serves the person 
next him. Yesterday the kingdom was one man, 
now it is a group. From the one who washes to 
the one whose feet are washed the kingdom grows 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 1 9 

and multiplies. It stands around us on even; side, 
— not in Pharisees nor in fanatics, not in noise nor 
tumult, but in modest and Christ like men. One 
can see it in their face, and catch it in the tone of 
their voice. And if one has eyes to see and ears 
to hear, then let him be of good cheer, for the 
kingdom of God is come. It is the world-wide 
state, whose law is the Divine will, whose members 
obey the spirit of Jesus, whose strength is good- 
ness, whose heritage is God. 

John Watson. 



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